Monday, May 28, 2007 Covington: Spoilt for choice By Looking in Gary Covington
"LEAH, a pretty young slave from the Citadel, has been claimed as body-slave by Josef, the handsome outlander who must now assume the responsibility of training her in the Tormunite ways of lust.
Together they embark upon a quest for the lovely slave Sianon, reportedly abducted by soldiers. Josef's worst fears are confirmed when he discovers Sianon is being held in the notorious fleshpots of the mines of Menirg. Pocketbook. 272 pages."
Once a month, a book bodega in the East End of London mails me a newspaper-like catalogue. It's tabloid size, about 40 pages, and offers short blurbs- like that above for The Slave Mines of Torunil by Aran Ashe - for around three thousand different books.
They're remainders, volumes that for some reason haven't sold out in regular bookstores. They're new books, publisher's editions, and not book club specials, and are on sale for usually less than half the cover price.
I regard the arrival of the catalogue as a monthly treat. I sit back in my armchair, red pen at the ready to circle anything I fancy, read every blurb in the sections which interest me, skim those which don't, and marvel at how, every month, new books are published on the same old subjects.
There must already be hundreds of volumes devoted to, say, the Battle of Waterloo and yet still they keep on coming. What on earth do their authors find new to write about?
The standards and old favorites turn up each month - Dickens, Doyle, Tennyson - reissued in even more lavish editions. Leather bindings, commissioned illustrations, watered silk bookmarks and the latest fad, facsimile printings of the original first issues.
They're novelty items really - books are to be read, not admired - and some of the older typefaces are the very devil to read.
The range of topics presented each month is seemingly infinite. Bagpipe technology? Locomotive boiler explosions? Feng Shui for cats? Quit scribbling. Someone's beat you to it and his book is in this month's catalogue.
Naturally there are books about books and a growing trend is for volumes of lists of books you should read or (by courtesy of sales figures and popularity polls) books you have read.
The books you must read are, interestingly, a spillover from the web. Blog stuff edited, collated and presented as books - a complete reversal of the usual "the printed word is doomed by computers" scenario.
Heading the field at the moment is a volume called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die edited (and books chosen) by a Doctor Peter Boxall. Boxall is a professor, well up on literary stuff, no fule he and a cut or two above the ordinary reader on the street.
I printed out Dr. Boxall's first one hundred titles (I'm not comfortable with screens - all those ads, clicking this or that, rocket-propelled scrolling), recognized a handful of authors but discovered I had not read one book on the list. Should I rush out, buy a couple, and get going? I'm heading for the three score years and ten and time's getting short.
Some folks are. Trundling about the web I found people who are actually reading their way through Dr. Boxall's list and crowing about it on blogs.
And, the web being a democratic sort of place, there are other folks posting up their own must-read lists and, incredibly, still more folks reading their way through those lists. Is that weird or what?
Oppositely, there's the books that ordinary mortals buy and read and, as might be expected, this top 100 is completely different to Dr. Boxall's, I was hard pressed to find a title common to both. But, and here I sighed a sigh of relief, at least I've read some of them including the most popular book of all time which is, apparently, Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings.
Of course the list - a British television poll - is only one list of many undoubtedly differing compilations but it is indicative of what we read.
At first glance it's overloaded with kiddie stuff like Rowling, Dahl, and Enid Blyton; I counted 22 out of the 100. Are readers dumbing down? No - the old favorites are still there.
The standards of Dickens, Dumas, Stevenson, Hardy, Austen and Tolstoy. The modern classics of Orwell, Steinbeck and Rushdie and the modern easy reads of Shute, Follet and super-easy Geoffrey Archer. I'd read 17 of the 100, which I thought was fair enough.
And now I've read the May catalogue. Will I order anything? That'd be telling but come on - how else do I find out if Sianon is rescued from the lecherous clutches of the Menirg miners.
